Re: [PATCH 0/3] x86: add cpus_scnprintf function v3

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 01:59:39PM -0700, Mike Travis wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 07:51:23PM +0200, Bert Wesarg wrote:
> >> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com> wrote:
> >>>   * Cleanup usages of cpumask_scprintf in the following files and add
> >>>     another interface to use cpulist_scnprintf where appropriate.
> >> On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 8:22 PM, Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com> wrote:
> >>>  Part of the change is readability, but also looking towards the future
> >>>  of 16k/64k/??? # of cpus, the straight mask approach will overflow the
> >>>  PAGE_SIZE buffer provided (though some pathological cases will overflow
> >>>  the range method as well.)  So we'll need some advancement in the format
> >>>  of the printout.
> >> Btw, I think you can now push for a deprecation of the 'old' mask
> >> attributes, with the justification you have given above. The other
> >> possibility is to change sysfs to provide bigger attribute buffers
> >> (CCed Greg for this).
> > 
> > Huh?
> > 
> > sysfs is "one value per file", if you are getting close to PAGE_SIZE in
> > any sysfs file, then you are doing something very wrong.
> > 
> > What sysfs file currently is trying to output data this big?
> > 
> > thanks,
> > 
> > greg k-h
> 
> Hi Greg,
> 
> There's none at the moment.  The increase is coming from printing the
> cpuset for various attributes, like cpus on a node, etc.  Since it uses
> cpumask_scnprintf(), this prints a bit map representing a cpumask_t.
> 
> With the increase to 4096 cpus, this string is now 1152 bytes long.  The
> next iteration will have 16384 cpus which will need 4608 bytes to fully
> display, overflowing a standard page.  I've added alternate interfaces
> that use cpulist_scnprintf() which has the advantage of collapsing the
> bits into ranges.  This though can result in a much larger output size
> if, for example only every other bit is set.
> 
> Btw, where does one value per file come from?

Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt, while a bit outdated, still
contains this rule.

> I see outputs like:
> 
> # cat /proc/self/stat
> 4313 (cat) R 4218 4313 4218 34816 4313 4194304 207 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 20 0 1 0 6802916 5672960 131 18446744073709551615 4194304 4212948 140735962676160 18446744073709551615 140499600349840 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 17 3 0 0 0 0 0

That's fine, it's /proc/, not /sys/ :)

thanks,

greg k-h